The Faculty Lounge

Dodd-Frank Limerick

The wonderful Limericks Économiques (Poems On The Dismal Science Of Economics By Dr. Goose) has the following limerick on the Dodd-Frank bill, making the point far more entertainingly than I did recently in Dodd-Frank Financial Reform: “I’ll Have the Meatless Entrée, Please”:

Financial Reform Bill

Now the Senate has passed legislation

To invigorate bank regulation,

But left many a crater

To be filled in later,

As lobbyists learned with elation.  

 

Reform's really only been bracketed

So Dodd and Frank soon must be back at it,

And the agencies' staff

Write the more-detailed half,

So the lobbyists still get a crack at it.

Also, if you’re still looking to beef up your Dodd-Frank acumen before the semester begins, recall the recent Dodd-Frank Masters forum over at the Glom, with close to 50 posts from a variety of commenters. 

 

More Dean News (Potentially)

It looks like the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law at Cleveland State University will be going into a dean search pretty soon.  Their current dean, Geoffrey Mearns, who has been acting provost at the university for the past six months has just been officially appointed as the new provost.  Full story here.  Phyllis Crocker is currently the Interim Dean at the law school.

John Douglass Stepping Down As Richmond Dean

Effective next June, John Douglass will end his term as Dean at the University of Richmond School of Law.  Dean Richmond will have been in the post for four years, including one year as interim dean.    Notwithstanding this news, it does appear that the tenure of law deans has increased in the last few years.  Still, the rate of turnover is still remarkable to me.  Although a dean shift can present an excellent opportunity for a school to take a breath and reconsider its path, it's also a potentially  tumultuous event.  I'm curious whether this would be considered a very high turnover rate for a CEO of a corporation with law-school-sized revenues.  (My highly uneducated guess is yes.)

The Fall Catalogs

 Mary Dudziak's post on Martha Minow's In Brown's Wake reminds me that this is going to be a busy fall for reading.   Other books from the fall catalogs that I'm very excited about are Chris Tomlins' Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 and Steven Lubet's Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial.  (Some of my thoughts on the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 are here.)

Today's New York Review of Books brought news of another book that I've put on my list -- Patrick Chura's Thoreau: The Land Surveyor.  (Very cool thing that I see is that the Concord library has posted on-line some  of Thoreau's land surveys.)  Now that's a topic I need to know more about -- particularly because Walden occupied such a key place in "Property and Progress."

Other recent books from the most recent issue of NYROB ... I'm sure Krawiec agrees with everything in Debra Satz' Why Some Things Should Not Be For Sale.

Prop 8 Overturned!!

Hot off the West Coast presses:  U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn Walker just issued a 138-page opinion overturning Proposition 8, the controversial public initiative in California which blocked same-sex marriage.  News coverage here.  The opinion is difficult to download from the District Court website, but here are some snippets:

"Proposition 8 does not survive rational basis review..."

"Proposition 8 places the force of law behind stigmas against gays and lesbians..."

"Stereotypes and misinformation have resulted in social and legal disadvantages for gays and lesbians..."

"The right to marry protects an individual's choice of marital partner regardless of gender... . Domestic partnerships do not satisfy California's obligation to allow plaintiffs to marry...."

I predict a 99.9% chance of this being appealed to the 9th Circuit! 

The Race Card at Longhorn U.

Yesterday a Fifth Circuit panel (judges Emilio Garza, Carolyn King, and Patrick Higginbotham) heard arguments in a case that addresses whether the consideration of race by the University of Texas in its undergraduate admissions process is unconstitutional.  The trial judge had dismissed the lawsuit last year.  You can find the oral argument recording here (look for Abigail Fisher et al. v. State of Texas et al.).  A related article from the local newspaper is here. 

The Top 10 Of Everything, But A Year Ago

It's August.  You haven't finished the article.  You haven't prepped the class.  Summer is almost over and you're not sure how it happened.  Is this the time to focus?  Is this the time to buckle down?  Is this the time to stop procrastinating and finish the job(s)?

Perhaps.  But in case you're like us, and you need just one more thing to do other than everything on your to-do list, here is Time's 2009 compendium The Top 10 of Everything.  But be warned: they don't make it easy to read these lists.   Maybe they understood that wasting time was exactly the point!

Surely Frozen Chozen's new Matzoh Crunch Ice Cream will make the list this year?

A Brief Farewell

I’ve enjoyed my time guest blogging here at The Faculty Lounge.  Thanks to Al, Dan, and the other members of the Lounge for the opportunity—I hope to do it again sometime.  For anyone interested, I’ve catalogued my previous posts here.

I’m signing off now to focus on some writing and other matters, including revisions to my book due out next fall from Yale University Press.  The working title is Liberty’s Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly.  Here is a brief description:

The freedom of assembly has been at the heart of some of the most important social movements in American history: antebellum abolitionism, women’s suffrage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the labor movement in the Progressive Era and after the New Deal, and the Civil Rights movement.  Claims of assembly stood against the ideological tyranny that exploded during the first Red Scare in the years surrounding the Great War and the second Red Scare of 1950s McCarthyism.  Abraham Lincoln once called the right of assembly part of “the Constitutional substitute for revolution.”  In 1939, the popular press heralded it as one of the “four freedoms” at the core of the Bill of Rights.  And even as late as 1973, John Rawls characterized it as one of our “basic liberties.”  But in the past thirty years, the freedom of assembly has become little more than a historical footnote in American political theory and law.  Some believe that assembly has been subsumed into the freedoms of speech and association and that we are none for the worse.  Others think we are better off without meaningful protections for group autonomy because they undercut antidiscrimination norms that underwrite modern civil rights statutes.  Liberty’s Refuge argues that these views could not be more wrong.  Our right to assemble—to form relationships, to gather, to exist as groups of our choosing—is fundamental to liberty and diversity.  Drawing from resources in constitutional law, history, and political theory, this book argues for a return to the freedom of assembly and the destabilizing difference that it brings.

And the tentative chapter titles:

Chapter 1: The Right Peaceably to Assemble

Chapter 2: The Emergence of Association in the National Security Era

Chapter 3: The Transformation of Association in the Equality Era

Chapter 4: A Theory of Assembly

Chapter 5: Reinvigorating Group Autonomy: Examples from an Online World

Chapter 1 draws heavily from an article in the Tulane Law Review, Chapter 2 from an article in the Tennessee Law Review, and portions of Chapter 3 from a forthcoming article in the Connecticut Law Review. 

I’d be delighted to receive feedback on the manuscript from anyone interested.  Please feel free to contact me directly.

Until next time.

Two Letters in Support of Elizabeth Warren

Two letters to President Obama -- one from 140 professors and another from 162 former students -- have joined the calls  for the appointment of Elizabeth Warren as the first director of the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection.

The academics' letter highlights Warren's "broad, and perhaps unique, perspective on why effective consumer protection is essential for the safety and soundness of the financial system and the health of the American economy."

It continues:

In both her scholarship and her public service, Professor Warren draws her conclusions from careful analysis of data. She listens carefully to alternate hypotheses and she is responsive to criticism. She speaks plainly and honestly. She owes no allegiance to the financial services industry or other special interest groups.

Professor Warren’s integrity and genuine concern for the plight of ordinary American families are sorely needed in Washington. We believe that Elizabeth Warren is the ideal choice to head the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection.

Read the academics' whole letter here and the students' whole letter here.

Do Not Trust The Rabbi Rankings.

All due deference to Filler, but the Newsweek rabbi rankings that he links to are not reliable.  

Newsweek's ranking methodology is crap.  It significantly overvalues the total number of brisses performed during the previous year, does not given sufficient credit for the number of bar and bat mitzvahs who go on to confirmation, places too much emphasis on contributions by major donors and not enough emphasis on the total percentage of families donating, and calculates congregation size on the basis of attendance at Kol Nidre rather than the more revealing Neilah closing service.

Influential Rabbis. In Case You Were Wondering.

I don't know why, but each year Newsweek comes out with its list of the 50 most influential rabbis in America.  This year's version is here.  #1 this year is Lubavitch rebbe Yehuda Krinsky.  But the folks at the Forward feel that this list unjustly marginalizes women rabbis.  And what they don't note, is that the Newsweek list surely marginalizes Reconstructionist rabbis who (unbeknownst to most Jews) probably represent the heartland of American Jewish faith (if not politics.)  So here is the Forward's list of the Sisterhood 50 - the most influential American women rabbis.

FWIW.

Last call for 2010-2011 law school visit information

I've heard from a bunch of people since I last updated the 2010-2011 law school visitor post, but to make one last request:  if you have new visitor information for either your school or yourself, please let me know and I will include it in the final 2010-2011 list.  You can either post the information in the comments or email me at appleman @ willamette . edu .

Thanks in advance!

The End of the Office

You heard it first at The Chronicle of Higher Ed.  I agree that taking away our private offices would encourage interaction.  I'm surprised that the office rent scheme that Lawrence Biemiller suggests hasn't already been floated by an administration.  This is the first time I've heard this idea floated, but I'm sure it won't be the last.